All posts filed under: Issues

With their lunch waiting on the table, a family in Baseco, Tondo, sat still and prayed: “Panginoon, ang bait-bait Niyo sa amin. Kulang ang aming mga kamay para tanggapin ang lahat ng biyaya na ibinigay Niyo sa amin (Lord, you are so good to us. Our hands are not enough to receive all the blessings from you).” Pinky Velez Poe, the special guest at that lunch, did her best to hold back tears. “You look around, and you think, ‘what biyaya (blessing)?’ There’s nothing by our normal standards—it’s a 20-square-meter house for eight people and they say ‘kulang ang mga kamay para sa biyaya,’” she said. “Where I come from, in the village where I live, families are fighting over money when there’s so much more where that money came from… It makes you realize that peace and joy really cannot be bought.” That day, Pinky ate from a basin (the family had no extra plates), and had feeding supplement for main course and burnt rice crust or tutong with evaporated milk for dessert. And she …

There are a lot of open secrets at the Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac. The most open and the least secret are the arrienda or leasing out of property being arranged by farmers even before the contentious land is distributed to them. The Department of Agrarian Reform has heard the same whispers, too, from different places. But by this time, the government knows talk is cheap, so it’s letting its money talk back—loud and clear. “It’s illegal and we will not honor that, but it’s real on the ground. That’s why this is what we’re solving first,” Agrarian Reform Undersecretary Jerry Pacturan said. “If you see the amounts we have now, it’s really quite substantial: P2 billion for credit fund, P1 billion for insurance, P2 billion for ARCCESS, which are mostly equipment and services. That’s about P5 billion that will have to be spent for the year,” he said. Pacturan heads the DAR’s support services office. ARCCESS is Agrarian Reform Community Connectivity and Economic Support Services, a massive and systematic effort by the DAR to help …

This is the second pat of my series on the fight for equity of Filipino veterans, written in 2008 when I was a Yuchengco media fellow at the University of San Francisco’s Center for the Pacific Rim. The U.S. government has since approved partial benefits for veterans but this recent story shows another blow to the seemingly endless struggle for equity. San Francisco – Some say they are fighting an unwinnable war, and perhaps they are, but they are soldiers – they will continue to fight, if it’s the last thing they do. By the looks of the Filipino World War II veterans – their faces old, their arms weak, their gaits slow – this struggle for recognition and proper compensation, or what is called “equity” around here, may just take up their last breath. After a near-victory in the 110th Congress, the veterans and their supporters are back to square one in a legislative battle that has now spanned six decades and reaped only piecemeal laws granting them citizenship, access to health care and …

This was written in 2008, when I was a Yuchengco media fellow at the University of San Francisco’s Center for the Pacific Rim. It’s part of a series I did on the struggle of the widows of Filipino soldiers who died fighting for their rightful benefits as U.S. veterans. Today I found this article. Sad, just sad. San Francisco – Pilar dela Cruz is 68 years old and worried about her taxes next year. “I just read in a newspaper that they want to increase taxes because of the crisis,” she says one afternoon after arriving home from her morning shift. Despite her own age and knee problem, dela Cruz, the widow of a Filipino veteran, is still working eight hours a day, five days a week, as a care provider for the elderly. Her husband Ricardo, a former guerilla fighter who has received no recognition or financial compensation for his service in the U.S. military during World War II, left her with nothing when he died in 2001. “I plan to work until I’m 70, so …

This is the continuation of a story I did in 2008 while I was a Yuchengo media fellow at the University of San Francisco-Center for the Pacific Rim. Some information may have already been superseded by more recent data. But hey, read on. After the two-month boot camp, enlistees with a college diploma are elevated to a rank three steps higher than the lowest. But sweeter than the rank is the bonus. Dancel and Edmilao, now both stationed at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, received a $12,000 bonus when they got out of training. Edmilao is also using his tuition assistance privilege to study environmental management at the University of Maryland. He already has an economics degree from the De La Salle University in Manila, but the educational benefit available to military personnel was too good to pass up. “I plan to be an officer,” says Edmilao, 28, who wants to maximize all the military benefits here but retire in the Philippines. George Barreto, a retired Marine, has also recently obtained a master’s degree …

I did this story in 2008 while I was a Yuchengo media fellow at the University of San Francisco-Center for the Pacific Rim. Some information may have already been superseded by more recent happenings. But it’s still a good read, methinks. San Francisco – They were told, sometime during their entry into the U.S. Navy, that a corpsman’s life in the battlefield lasted only about 10 seconds during World Wars I and II, and the Vietnam War. Navy corpsmen, the equivalent of the Army’s medic, were often the first targets of the enemy because in their hands lay the fate of wounded troops. “During a gunfight, there would always be two men standing guard with the corpsman. We are not allowed to fire our weapons unless in defense,” says Joshua Dancel, a Filipino-American who has completed a seven-month tour of duty in Fallujah, Iraq, one of the most chaotic cities when the U.S. troops first advanced into Saddam Hussein’s turf. “Our work is to stabilize patients until their medical evacuation to the shock-trauma platoon. The …